Everyone has heroes. Librarians
have Melvil Dewey, auto enthusiasts have Henry Ford...and we
have Joshua Pusey. Ol' Josh, a Philadelphia lawyer, invented
the matchbook in 1892 right here in the United States.* Diamond Match Company purchased the rights to it
in 1894, and the matchbook was on its way.

When the first commercially
printed matchcover was produced, and who was responsible for
it, are murky questions. The best current guess is Binghamton
Match Co., NY, 1893/1894. Binghamton was actually the first to
produce a matchbook from Pusey's invention, but Diamond, according
to the story, sued them out of existence for patent infringements.
One of the earliest covers is the "Piso" matchcover.
Apparently, it was actually displayed at the 1952 RMS convention,
but to my knowledge hasn't been seen since.

There is another close
contender, though. Kaeser & Blair, c. 1895. Kaeser &
Blair was, and still is, an advertising/ novelty/jack-of-all
trades company whose association with matchbooks goes back almost
to the very beginnings. I have a letter from the president of
the company stating that he is under the impression that it was,
indeed, K & B which printed the first matchbook. Perhaps
it was Kaeser & Blair that printed the Piso cover for Binghamton.
Other than that, however, I've been able to find neither any
substantiating nor any conflicting information.

A particularly famous
early advertising cover appearedin 1889, when the manager of the Mendelson Opera
Company bought 200 blank matchbooks and had hand-printed messages
and pictures of the operas leading players put on them.
There is only one copy of this matchbook left today. It was owned
by Diamond International for many years and was insured for $25,000.
[see pic on main page]. Last time I heard, it was owned
by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia and was on display
at Diamond's headquarters in Cloquet, MN.

The next big milestone
in our exciting story came in 1902, when a young salesman for
Diamond, H. C. Traute, strolled into the office one afternoon
with an order for 10 million matchbooks from Pabst Brewing Co.
Up to that point, matchbooks hadn't caught on in any major way,
but this was the first large-scale order, and it heralded a new
era in the American match manufacturing industry. It was also
Traute, by the way, who came up with the phrase, "Close
Cover Before Striking."

From there, matchbooks
reached their golden age in the 1940s and 1950s, with fine artwork
and a dazzling variety of types and sizes. In the mid-1980s,
the American match industry collapsed, a victim of high labor
costs and overseas competition, and with the current anti-smoking
campaigns and disposable lighters, the easy availability of the
matchbook has been on the decline since the early 1990s. Whether
it will eventually disappear all together in the future is anyone's
guess. Because of its American origins, the matchbook has always
been basically a phenomenon of the Western World. The rest of
the world has always mainly stayed with the matchbox. One would
think, at least domestically, that the matchbook would stay alive
for its advertising advantages alone...we'll see.

[* Pusey's claim
as the inventor of the matchbook has been challenged, since it
didn't look like the matchbook. On June 20, 1893, Charles Bowman
patented a matchbook that looks like our matchbook today (and
he had actually applied for his patent in 1892).]